If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

NVIDIA 2010 Driver Year In Review

12-17-2010, 11:20 AM

Phoronix: NVIDIA 2010 Driver Year In Review

At the end of each year for the past five years we have delivered "year in review" articles looking at the performance of NVIDIA's (and ATI/AMD's) proprietary Linux drivers. Both in terms of new features introduced during the year in their driver updates and benchmarking the driver releases to see how the performance has evolved over twelve months. With 2010 coming to an end, it is time for this year's driver reviews. We are starting this year seeing how the NVIDIA performance has matured in 2010.

At the end of each year for the past five years we have delivered "year in review" articles looking at the performance of NVIDIA's (and ATI/AMD's) proprietary Linux drivers. Both in terms of new features introduced during the year in their driver updates and benchmarking the driver releases to see how the performance has evolved over twelve months. With 2010 coming to an end, it is time for this year's driver reviews. We are starting this year seeing how the NVIDIA performance has matured in 2010.

I think that the strange VDPAU spike in 269.19.21 is caused by a bug that affected the 260 series sice the beginning and that caused a massive amount of ram to be allocated on VDPAU init. In fact VDPAU was unusuable on relatively low-memory systems (1GB) until 260.19.26. Details are on nvnews.

Comment

The test is a bit flawed. If there were any performance improvements in nvidia drivers, I don't expect them to apply to the 9 series. Hell, they're probably not optimizing for the 200 series anymore.
In short, you should have used a GTX400-something instead of the 9800GTX.

Comment

The test is a bit flawed. If there were any performance improvements in nvidia drivers, I don't expect them to apply to the 9 series. Hell, they're probably not optimizing for the 200 series anymore.
In short, you should have used a GTX400-something instead of the 9800GTX.

Comment

All the drivers used permit "generations" 4-6, and the later drivers permit Gen7 (Fermi). I think any of Gen6 would be valid tests, while anything Gen5 or lower probably isn't being optimized anymore.

I've been using nothing but nvidia since the 6000 series and I'm fairly certain you don't get performance improvements 6 months after the release of a new generation. Maybe for SLI, but for single cards setup I've never noticed anything. Which is ok, it just means we get proper support asap, not 2 years after we buy the card.